[Actionchix] HTML helping hands
jennyw
jennyw at dangerousideas.com
Thu Mar 16 10:23:52 EST 2006
Mary wrote:
> At the moment, the arugment is that our pages don't auto-validate. And
> there are a *lot* of people who still use:
>
> <ul>
> <li>list item 1
> <li>list item 2
> </ul>
>
> which is not XHTML. Some of these people willbe writing content for us
> *after* the transition. Unless the CMS auto-validates and cleans HTML,
> XHTML will be hard to continually maintain.
We might be able to do that. I'd propose trying this:
* We strongly suggest that unless contributors feel comfortable with
xhtml, to use either a humane text format or a visual editor that
produced xhtml output. All new users would be setup to use one or the
other by default. Plone includes ReStructured Text[1] as a humane text
format and Kupu[2] as a visual editor (Plone supports older options as
well, like Structured Text and Epoz, but I'd suggest keeping things simple).
* If people choose to be responsible for xhtml, we send their documents
through a validator. If a document is invalid, we give them the option
of a) fixing it themselves; or b) running it through HTML Tidy[3]. If we
want to avoid possible data loss by running through Tidy (which I think
is a low probability), then we could also offer option c) saving anyway,
but with the understanding that a notice will be sent to Web volunteers
(either a help desk type system or a mailing list). Of course, offering
option c would potentially be aggravating and difficult to manage.
* Write a robot to periodically crawl the site and check the pages
against a validator.
Jen
1: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
2: http://kupu.oscom.org/
3: http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
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